The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  This, too, was a viewpoint that would reverberate down through the decades. “Authoritarianism,” scholars would come to agree, was a property associated with working-class voters, with populism, and the answer to it was rule by elites. White-collar authorities had to be strengthened in order to fend off working-class authoritarianism.

  Now, we have seen lots of authoritarian deeds in this book—strike-breaking private armies and so on—but precious few of them can be laid at the feet of the working class. On the contrary: it has consistently been elite fears of working-class votes that gives rise to Democracy Scares. This historical contradiction of the “working-class authoritarian” thesis seems to have been obvious to no one, however. Elites must have greater authority, the argument went, or else authoritarianism will win out. This can only mean that some group’s authority is nonauthoritarian by definition—and it is of course the enlightened authority of the highly educated who are always the heroes of consensus literature.

  They are the ones who know how to meet the grievances of the working class with stone-faced discipline. The populists may crave authority, but we the authorities will break them of that.

  * * *

  THANKS TO THE work of Hofstadter, Bell, Shils, and Lipset, anti-populism became one of the great themes of the consensus years. Everyone wanted it to be true. Everyone agreed on it. Mass movements of working people were dangerous.

  And then: the whole scholarly edifice came crashing down. The redefinition of populism as proto-fascism, you will recall, was based on the psychohistorical portrait of 1890s Populism by Richard Hofstadter. Soon it became clear that Hofstadter had done little archival research on Populism. He had not read deeply in the movement’s literature or studied its record in government. His grasp of the movement was based on just a handful of primary sources, some of them only loosely connected to the People’s Party itself—cherry-picking taken to a kind of extreme.

  Historians who did do research in Populist archives set to work enthusiastically demolishing the Hofstadter thesis. They proved that Populism wasn’t any more backward-looking than any other movement that protested capitalism. That the Pops weren’t against industrialization, although they didn’t like the particular way the robber barons were directing it. That they weren’t hostile to education. That they weren’t nativists; in fact, they competed for immigrant votes. 26

  Hofstadter’s most sensational accusation against Populism—that it was the fountainhead of American anti-Semitism—turned out to be a wild exaggeration. It drew a ferocious, fact-filled rebuke from the historian Norman Pollack, who showed that, while there were indeed anti-Semitic Populists here and there, radical farmers on the Great Plains were probably less anti-Semitic than were other elements of 1890s society. His conclusion, after conducting research in a number of midwestern state archives: “the incidence of Populist anti-Semitism was infinitesimal.” 27

  To identify “status anxiety” as the source of mass protest movements—and also as the reason to dismiss them as irrational—sounded ever so scientific, but it turned out to be completely arbitrary, a label the critic (or historian) could affix to almost any group he chose in order to disparage it. To apply the term to the Populists, Hofstadter basically had to ignore the movement’s voluminous and extremely rational concern with practical economic matters. Remember, the Pops came up during a time of terrible farm prices and a severe business depression. They faced these developments squarely and with comparatively little scapegoating, kind of an impressive achievement for the nineteenth century when you think about it. Dismissing their discontent as “status anxiety” comes close to denying the reality of economic hardship altogether. 28

  Under this hailstorm of rebuke, Richard Hofstadter eventually gave up trying to defend the Populism chapters of The Age of Reform . 29 His status-anxiety theory was tossed into the dumpster of discredited hypotheses, joining the Frontier thesis in the pile of scholarly discards. Charles Postel, the historian whose authoritative 2007 book on Populism buried what was left of The Age of Reform , has described the Hofstadter view as “largely intuitive.” This is being polite. Christopher Lasch, who was Hofstadter’s protégé at Columbia, believed Hofstadter’s contempt for Populism in fact betrayed his cohort’s “cultural prejudices” against the lower middle class. 30

  * * *

  HERE’S THE CRAZY thing, though. Academic anti-populism lives on. Indeed, it thrives. The almost complete discrediting of its founding text seems to count for nothing. Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy’s norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery. Upon Hofstadter’s famous mistake the burgeoning pedagogy of “populism studies” builds its theories and convenes its panels. Out of this scholarly blunder of the 1950s has grown the common sense of ruling elites everywhere.

  But of course it’s not just Hofstadter’s mistake. Consensus-era anti-populism built upon prejudices that were inherited from conservatives in the 1930s, which they had inherited from conservatives in the 1890s. All that was really new in the postwar years was the advanced sociology and the slightly more sophisticated psychological put-downs. Otherwise, the elements of the anti-populist stereotype remained stubbornly the same, and so did the social position of those who embraced it. Indeed, it seems that whenever we find someone attacking populism, their underlying purpose is to shore up the legitimacy of whatever system it is that has made them an elite.

  What motivated adherents of this anti-populist creed, in each historical iteration, was raw self-interest. The core of the consensus school’s viewpoint, as Michael Rogin described it, was “the hope that if only responsible elites could be left alone, if only political issues could be kept from the people, the elites would make wise decisions.” 31 This is the essence of anti-populism always.

  Today the “hope” for wise decisions by elites rolls irresistibly on, while the war on populism continues in almost exactly the same terms used by Hofstadter and Shils in the consensus days of 1955, the same terms used by America’s eminent lawyers in 1936 and by America’s leading economists and aristocrats in 1896. It doesn’t seem to matter that the theory is based on a debunked historical hypothesis. On it goes, repeating the same eternal archetype: the bigotry of ordinary people, the folly of protest movements, and the wisdom of elites.

  The context of the Eisenhower years is long gone, of course: self-assured liberalism evaporated decades ago, the Cold War is over, the academy is in love with forms of conflict that the fifties mind could never have imagined. But somehow the consensus faith plays right on through it all, tootling its one-note song of anti-populist indignation even as the liberal sun sets and the right-wing night falls.

  It lives on because the archetype is the thing, the system of symbols and characters that has been incorporated into our modern-day canon of political myths. When someone moans about populism, we know instantly that they are summoning up a vision of a society directed by responsible professionals, always including themselves, always concurring prudently with one another, always doing their best to steer the world through complex problems. These professionals are all highly educated; in fact, they probably all went to a tiny handful of schools. If it’s pundits we’re talking about, they work for one of a tiny handful of media outlets; if it’s policy advisers, they work for one of a tiny handful of think tanks. They might not all agree with one another down to the letter, but agreement itself—consensus—remains for them the noblest of goals.

  6

  Lift Every Voice

  At the conclusion of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama—in some ways the last great, unambiguous triumph of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Alabama state capitol building, its Confederate flag flapping in the breeze, and recited the words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Before he came to that famous peroration, however, he gave his fellow marchers a short lesson in a
different chapter of American history—the origins of racial segregation. Where did this awful system come from, anyway? King’s answer: it began, in part, as a stratagem to defeat Populism, which had made a shocking bid in the 1890s to bring together poor blacks and poor whites into overwhelming majorities across the South.

  The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

  The powerful, however, didn’t fancy being unseated from their position of dominance in the South. To protect themselves, they tried to divide their working-class enemies, falling back on the old ruse of white supremacy. “They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it,” King continued, “thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist movement.”

  They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist movement of the nineteenth century.

  What followed was one of King’s all-time great images. The Bourbons, he recounted, “took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”

  And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow.

  That, King concluded, was the tragic story of how the original Populist revolt was squashed. The masters of the South trashed their own society, set human against human in a racist death struggle, all to keep themselves secure in their exalted place. They segregated their world to death:

  They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality. 1

  It was a remarkable speech in many ways, not least because in this passage King got the broad sweep of the Populist story right. By 1965 that word and that story had grown cloudy with demonization of the sort we saw in the last chapter. Indeed, before the decade of the 1960s was out, the media would crown as America’s premier populist none other than King’s nemesis George Wallace, the snarling segregationist who sat in the Alabama governor’s chair at the moment King spoke.

  But for now that poisonous irony was still in the future. In 1965 idealism was still capable of carrying the day, and King looked back through the fog of confusion to recall how America’s original movement of working-class unity was defeated. It wasn’t just a historical point of interest for him. By describing Populism’s goal as a “great society”—President Lyndon Johnson’s name for his civil rights and anti-poverty measures—King was suggesting that the movement of the 1890s had an obvious modern counterpart. Working people of both races could come together once more to build a nation of justice and plenty.

  What King hinted at, others stated directly. Michael Harrington, the democratic socialist author, was in the audience in Montgomery that day and set down the message for readers of the New York Herald Tribune on March 28, 1965: this movement was not going to stop with civil rights. “King and the others made it clear that they look, not simply to the vote, but to a new coalition of the black and white poor and unemployed and working people,” Harrington wrote. “They seek a new Populism.”

  Harrington knew whereof he spoke. By “populism” he meant a transracial movement of the working class that aimed to reform capitalism from the bottom up and distribute its wealth more evenly. Harrington was right to attribute such aspirations to King and his fellow leaders in the civil rights movement. He was also right to understand that a populist sensibility, stirred up by the successful struggle for civil rights, was sweeping over the country, building enthusiasm for “participatory democracy” and popularizing catchphrases such as “Power to the People.”

  Consensus intellectuals had proclaimed “the end of ideology” just a few years previously, telling the nation that the big political problems had pretty much been solved. Mass movements were things of the benighted past. Today, the leaders of every group were seated comfortably around the boardroom table, and they got along famously with one another. Rationality and pluralism reigned, with stability and equilibrium for all.

  But now the men of consensus were rubbing their eyes behind those heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and gaping at what was transpiring outside the faux gothic windows: there were millions of people in the streets, demanding an end to segregation and then to poverty, war, and sexism. There were students sitting in at lunch counters, cops unleashing dogs on protesters, Klansmen blowing up churches, and racists going mad on TV, dumping acid into the swimming pool rather than see it integrated. There were protesters surrounding the Pentagon, fighting the cops in Chicago, ransacking the dean’s office; there were bomb threats and sometimes real bombs; there were consumer advocates and wildcat strikes and even farmer protests, all over again. Never has so cocksure a worldview seemed to crumble so completely so quickly.

  * * *

  TODAY, MARTIN LUTHER King is far better remembered for his heroic battles against segregation than for his determination to humanize the capitalist system. But by the time of the Selma march, King was deeply immersed in workers’ issues. He had spoken at many union gatherings, labor leaders had attended his marches, union lobbyists had helped get the civil rights acts through Congress, and union members had donated heavily to King’s organization over the years. The civil rights movement’s various tactics—boycotts, sit-ins, mass demonstrations—were consciously borrowed from the labor actions of the 1930s. * Before King became the country’s preeminent civil rights figure, that role was arguably filled by A. Philip Randolph, president of a union of railroad workers. It was Randolph who first proposed a civil rights march on Washington (in 1941) and who helped organize the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom at which King delivered his famous speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  The explanation for this relationship is simple: the labor movement and the civil rights movement were natural allies that shared similar goals and similar techniques. King returned to the point again and again in his speeches. “Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” he observed in his remarks to an AFL-CIO convention in 1961. “There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers.”

  Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth. 2

  The South had always been hostile to labor unions, but with the success of the civil rights movement, King ventured, that would change. Help blacks secure their right to vote, he promised a gathering of the United Auto Workers, and “a new day will dawn which will see militant, steadfast and reliable congressmen from the South joining those from the northern industrial states to design and enact legislation for the people rather than for the privileged.” 3

  Those last few words deserve our attention because they are a classic variation on the traditional populist formula. In truth, King used a lot of populist p
hrases. He spoke, for example, of the “forgotten men” imprisoned in the ghettos of the big cities. He charged that America “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” 4

  King’s great goal—to move beyond legal equality and secure democratic economic reforms as well—became especially clear in the later 1960s, when he advanced to what he called a “new phase” of the struggle. If the first phase was devoted to recovering citizenship rights, the next one was aimed at securing the economic equality that this country has never granted anyone without a fight. As the movement advanced to this next objective, King pointed out, many of its white allies would probably drop away. It had been easy for a certain sort of prosperous white American to support civil rights, he told an audience of Teamsters in 1967, “when there was a simple objective of curbing brutality,” of taming “the coarse sheriffs” of Birmingham and Selma. There was a dualistic clarity to those early struggles, with their brave stands against racist laws and pigheaded enforcers. *

  But the next phase, King told his audience, would be different. It would carry a “real cost” for people outside the South; a cost that would be measurable in dollars. Demanding economic equality would mean massive federal “appropriations to create jobs and job training; it means the outlay of billions for decent housing and equal education.” Still, this war against poverty had to happen:

  Today Negroes want above all else to abolish poverty in their lives, and in the lives of the white poor. This is the heart of their program. To end humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task. It is natural for Negroes to turn to the labor movement because it was the first and pioneer anti-poverty program. 5